(1962- ) Australian playwright, also active as a screenwriter, his credits in the latter capacity including a screenplay for the 2010 film version of Edge of Darkness (1985), a UK television tale in six parts in which the government has colluded with a multinational corporation to construct a highly-toxic nuclear power plant almost certain to instigate toxic pollution. Of his numerous plays, When the Rain Stops Falling (performed 2008; 2009) is of sf interest for its parlaying of narratives of family dysfunction into a dark vision of a 2039 world in the grips of Climate Change, personal tragedies being understood as a synecdoche of planetary dysfunction: what we sow in our lives, we shall reap in the world. The play begins with a Fortean moment (see Charles Fort): a fish falls from the sky into the Australian desert, but the rain is unlikely to last. [JC]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →